Monday, November 13, 2017
Elder of Ziyon
A survey of civic organizations that have embraced the BDS agenda would show a number of groups (possibly a majority) in a state of institutional collapse. Which surfaces the question of whether dying organizations tend to embrace BDS on their way to oblivion vs. the embrace of the BDS being the cause (vs. the symptom) of decay.
An example I’ve covered ad
nauseam for the “dying institutions embrace BDS” argument is the US Presbyterian
Church (PCUSA) which voted in BDS in 2004, only to overturn that vote in
2006 with subsequent votes in 2008, 2010 and 2012 also ratifying lack of
interest for returning to the BDS fold.
Like the University
of Michigan - now about to enjoy its tenth referendum on boycotting Israel
- the Presbyterian Church was never going to be left alone by the Israel haters
until they finally voted as they were told (which they finally did in 2014 when
they reinstated their BDS credentials).
Those who understood church politics well enough to see past
the BDS issue understood that boycott votes that took place year after year
after year were a symptom of a much deeper problem within the church having
nothing to do with Israel or the Middle East. For the Presbyterian Church, like
all Mainstream Protestant denominations in the US, has seen membership decline
by 50% over the last several decades and has struggled to stay relevant in a
world where people are not interested in listening to what the church has to
say, much less joining a dying institution.
This collapse of membership can be traced to changes in the
wider culture, notably secularization and the rise of popular Evangelical
Christianity. Both of these factors
created competition for the Mainline Protestant denominations (which include
Methodists, Episcopalians, Lutherans as well as different branches of
Presbyterianism) who tried to deal with these challenges through a logical
approach that only accelerated their decline.
Why, thought the Mainliners decades ago when these trends
were becoming apparent, should we be making it easy for people to join
Evangelical churches or abandon church affiliation altogether by making it
harder to understand, much less embrace, the creed of one Protestant sect over
another? Why, in other words, should
subtle and difficult-to-understand doctrinal difference between Methodist and
Presbyterian (for example) become a barrier for someone to join either church?
And so the Mainline churches joined together in ecumenical
communion in which these differences in doctrine were played down in order to
stress what united vs. what separated one Mainline institution from another.
Perfectly reasonable, most of us would agree even today. But as it turned out de-emphasizing what made
it unique to be a Presbyterian made it difficult to explain what unique value
one would get out of becoming one. And
having put aside religious disputes to focus on areas of agreement, what most
churches found agreement on was secular politics.
This swing towards politics had two unintended
consequences.
First, it helped to accelerate the decline of every church
participating in this strategy. For, as
it turned out, if all the church was offering were ways to participate in
social justice causes, then it was competing with a host of secular organizations,
many of them offering more direct and effective opportunities to fight for
those same causes. More importantly for
readers of this site, the focus on politics made these organizations vulnerable
to those who wanted to leverage church reputation for their own political
ends.
And this is the true cause of how BDS became Presbyterian
dogma, replacing older dustier traditions outlined in the church’s Book of
Order, as the source of militant, decades-long debate. It was during the course of this transition
that church leaders rose to their positions fully committed to the anti-Israel
cause – regardless of what harm it might do to the church they purported to
lead.
And thus the corruption that led to countless BDS votes turned
an organization that once served as backbone to US cultural life into nursing
home for aging members and clergy, led by officials more interested in
overseeing the decline of a politically homogenous institution than building up
a church that might stray from now doctrinal anti-Israel animus.
So here we have an example of how a dying religious
institution tried to redefine itself as a secular political one, only to see
its collapse accelerate as outsiders with no interest in the church scavenged
the remains in hope of giving their BDS agenda unearned weight. One can see
secular examples of similar “Walking Dead” institutions in groups like the Lawyer’s
Guild.
With PCUSA as the exemplar of the “dying institutions tend
to embrace BDS” hypothesis, we will next turn to an example where the embrace
of Israel hatred preceded organization disintegration: The Quakers.
